Bernard Baruch

Bernard Mannes Baruch (19 August 1870-20 June 1965) was an American financier, stock investor, philanthropist, statesman, and political adviser.

Biography
Bernard Mannes Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina on 19 August 1870 to a poor Jewish family, and his family moved to New York City in 1881. Baruch had made a personal fortune on the New York Stock Exchange by 1914, and he became a respected adviser to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy, preferring to be an eminence grise than to run for elective office. In World War I, he served under President Wilson on the Council of National Defense, and he chaired the War Industries Board from 1917 to 1919, exercising enormous power over the US wartime economy. He also served as the US economic adviser at the Paris Peace Conference after the war. During World war II, he was special adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on manpower mobilization and post-war planning, and he was appointed to the UN Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, proposing a World Atomic Authority with full control over the manufacture of atomic bombs throughout the world; the Soviet Union rejected this proposal. Baruch died in Manhattan in 1965 at the age of 94. Baruch College in New York was named for him.